Budget: Myanmar (Burma)

This is one of our Budget series of posts to give you an idea of how much we spent traveling around the world. Here we will look at Myanmar. Check our posts to see what kind of activities we did and where we stayed!

In Myanmar we used the kyat. We converted to US dollars using the current conversion rates at the time of our visit. It was approximately 1000 kyat to 1 dollars. Businesses used this as a flat rate, though the real rate at the time was more like 1,300 kyat to $1.

Total Spent (18 days): $1304.72

Accommodation: $495.32

We stayed in a variety of accommodations: some hotels, some hostels, one dorm room. Everywhere we stayed included breakfast and drinkable water.

Activities: $202.59

Activities are quite affordable in Myanmar. We did several day tours, both in boats and cars. This included entrance and camera fees to all pagodas as well as a few museums. We also did a puppet show!

Alcohol: $28.65

Overall, beer is quite reasonably priced in Myanmar. You can normally get a large bottle of beer for under $2. We also visited a winery and had a couple of glasses of wine!

Food: $170.95

Food was wonderfully inexpensive in Myanmar. You could get a good meal with drink for under $10. You can also do it even cheaper if you are a little braver than we are: if you ate street food from stalls then it would be even more affordable. We didn’t as almost every person we met who had was sick. Though, we did hear of one friend recently who had no problems!

Miscellaneous: $40.02

This included a several souvenirs, several bathroom fees, a laundry, and a few exchange transactions.

Transportation: $267.19

This included a variety of taxis and buses. The biggest cost was a boat ride from Mandalay to Bagan which was $80!

Visas: $100

We purchased visas online prior to arriving using the new online purchase tool for tourist visas. It was more expensive than it would have been in person in Bangkok, but a fraction of the time.

This divides out to $72.48/day which is under our $100/day budget. It is not as low as we were hoping for time in Asia, though we knew Myanmar would not be the cheapest country in Asia due to the visa fees and the relatively high cost of accommodation.